this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2025
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politics
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The DOJ has always been a kind-of weapon, intended to legitimize the use of force against enemies of the state. This is, incidentally, why incoming Presidents are loathe to use it against their corrupt predecessors. And why DOJs tend to fixate on people with virtually no political capital (minority political leadership, black market traffickers, migrants, foreign business interests, and domestic low-level con-artists) while steering well clear of sitting politicians, large cap business executives, large church leaders, and dignitaries from wealthy allied nations.
Trump's pogrom on migrants and minorities is spilling over into targeting people who aren't traditionally on the DOJ's shit list, because he's far more concerned with the raw metrics of his department (the volume of individuals arrested and deported) than the consequences of his policies (deteriorating trade relations, impact to domestic trade and travel, long term market stability, long term labor prices, etc). And his pardons and case dismissals are a more vulgar effort at self-enrichment than has historically been seen (although hardly without precedent)
What has shifted isn't the DOJ's purpose but the individuals that are now considered "fair game" in the eyes of Department leadership. One could argue that this is partially Biden's fault - he "shot at the king and missed" when the Southern District indicted Trump a few years ago. But you can go back to the Bush Era USA firing or the Nixon Saturday Night Massacre to see similar instances of Presidents using their stranglehold on the Justice Department to shape prosecutorial action.
This has been a fundamental flaw in the US political system for ages. We claim to have an independent judiciary (a joke under any extended scrutiny) but what does that mean without an independent prosecutorial agency?
So, nobody told Merrick?
Garland was more than happy to prosecute all the goofy little J6ers, along with the traditional list of migrants and smugglers and foreign adversaries.
He just steered clear of anyone with power.
Was this a problem?
Chasing the small fry while the big fish swims away?
Some might argue it would have been more beneficial to flip defendants into witnesses and use them to prosecute the media organizers and financiers, not unlike how the FBI (finally, after decades of dragging their feet) broke up the East Coast mafia gangs.
Wasn’t that what Jack Smith was doing?
Garland waited until late November of 2022 to appoint a special counsel, after Democrats in Congress had lost their subpoena power, and put a guy with a broken leg on the case. Smith's office focused on the Mar-a-Lago documents case, which floundered for years, before his very appointment as special counsel was rejected by a Trump appointee Judge (which they recognized was a problem going into the case clung to the venue regardless).
To my knowledge, Smith didn't pursue any third party financiers or media figures responsible for organizing the J6 riot. His primary role was to fumble the Mar-a-Lago documents case. He did get a Grand Jury to indict Trump for inciting a riot, under a more-friendly DC venue, in August of 2023. But Smith never managed to bring the case to trial in the subsequent year and a half. The case was scuttled as soon as the election was over.
And by your reckoning that was them chasing the small fry?
What was the most high profile conviction Smith secured?
You mean in the year and a half he had two of the biggest cases in American legal history? One of them with the most obstructionist judge possible?
You're right, the DoJ totally failed the bourgeois. Or was failed by the bourgeois. Or whatever.
Sam Bankman-Fried went from "investigated" to "in jail" inside nine months. The entire OJ Simpson Trial only lasted eight months. The time between the murder, the failed criminal case, and the successful civil suit, and the conviction was less than three years. Trump's only been in office for six months and he's already taken 20 different cases before the SCOTUS.
Seems like an experienced veteran DOJ attorney would have known to file the case in a more friendly venue. But I guess a man that loses 78% of his court cases is just too damned slick for the Garland DOJ.
Almost as though they were set up to lose by an incompetent chief executive and his worthless cronies.
Golly you seem to know a lot about the federal prosecutors office. Maybe you could run for something and tell everyone to get it right so there will never be any mistakes anymore.
Sadly, I don't have any billionaires willing to put up seven digits to stack my campaign.
But hey, better luck with whatever slop the next election cycle feeds you, I guess.